Fanfic / The Conversion Bureau: The Chatoverse

The Chatoverse, written by the eponymous Chatoyance is a collection of Recursive Fanfiction stories based on the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfic The Conversion Bureau. While not the first spin-off stories to be published for TCB, the Chatoverse is possibly the most infamous of the spin-offs and is the Trope Codifier for many conventions used in other fanfics.

The Earth is over-polluted and overpopulated beyond relief. The Corporate Worldgovernment controls the entire planet, and only 600 families control the corporation. However, appearing suddenly in the Pacific is the magical land of Equestria, which promises a solution to the myriad of woes humanity suffers. There is just one catch: become a Pony, and live in Equestria itself.

The fics written by Chatoyance which constitute the "canon" Chatoverse can be found here.

Tropes found in the Chatoverse:

A-D

• After the End: The Earth's ecosystems have all but completely collapsed, the population has been ravaged by disease, vast stretches of urban and suburban development have been abandoned, and the human population is dwindling rapidly as humans are ponified. Nineteen billion refugees inhabit a world which will be turned into Equestria in eight years.
• Airstrip One: Earth's One World Government has grouped the former nations of the world into administrative zones. Most people still refer to specific regions by their old names.
• Alien Geometries: Equestria's reality is a flat plane, rather than a planet. There is no “edge” to the land; traveling in any direction will eventually loop back around on the other “side”. Theoretically, this should apply to upward and downward travel as well, though no one has ever tested it for reasons that should be reasonably obvious.
• And I Must Scream: Petrification is supposed to be the kinder and gentler pony alternative to the death sentence, but the soul of the pony being punished remains frozen within their stone form, unable to pass on into the afterlife and reenter the cycle of reincarnation. When times have changed sufficiently, Celestia is shown to reanimate petrified ponies so that they may fulfill their destinies. This is part of the plot of “TCB: The Reasonably Adamant Down With Celestia Newfoal Society!”.
• Apocalypse How: Planetary Metaphysical Annihilation: Earth is being completely overwritten by Equestria with nary a physical trace of where it once was.
• Armies Are Evil: Blackmesh Security advertises their dedication to enforcing the will of the Corporate Worldgovernment, and uses the opportunity to brutalize malcontents as a recruitment enticement.
• Artificial Intelligence: In New Universe One: The Pony Singularity and New Universe Four: Phoenix In Hooves.
• Artistic License – Biology: Solving world hunger by reprocessing human waste into food is no more plausible than any other form of Perpetual Motion Machine; human waste, after all, is made up of what's left over from the food after it's been eaten.
• Artistic License – Nuclear Physics: In "Ten Minutes: Aftermath," the nuclear device used was capable of destroying half the planet. Such a nuclear device would be impossibly large.
  • However, the nuclear devices in her story work on quantum mechanical principles. This is highly speculative at best.
• Author Appeal: GLBT themes, transhumanism, androgyny, Humans Are the Real Monsters, alternate dimensions with alien physics and strange geometries.
• Author Avatar: Celestia is pretty much Chatoyance's avatar.
• Author Tract:
  • "New Universe Three: The Friendship Virus" has nothing to do with The Conversion Bureau stories other than some name-dropping that could easily be exchanged with anything else. It's a retrospective tale of a world wherein a group of bioterrorists calling themselves "The Conversion Bureau' were inspired by My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic to bring about a pacifistic utopian world by creating and releasing a DNA altering virus that eliminated most differences between the sexes. Genetic tendencies towards aggression and territoriality were rewritten, oxytocin production increased, but most importantly – as emphasized by the narrator's thoughts – testosterone production in males was cut down to one third. The result is that males and females both lose most of their violent and territorial tendencies.
  • Constant anti-nuclear power messages are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore, both due to their frequency, and due to the increasingly dramatic events ascribed to various incidents incidents.
    • The kinda-sorta TCB-related Friendship Is Optimal: Caelum Est Conterrens describes the 2011 Fukushima incident as "a nightmare disaster that would murder people for hundreds of years".
    • Recombinant 63: A Conversion Bureau Story indicates that the entire Japanese archipelago has been lethally irradiated, forcing the population to evacuate and spread throughout the world in a great diaspora.
  • There is also the bashing of religion as either evil or deluded.
  • A strong anti-genetic engineering message is also present in her stories as well.
• The Bad Guy Wins: In New Universe Seven: Mankind Triumphant!, humanity reduces Equestria to a smoldering crater, decapitates Celestia, puts her screaming head in a box forever and enslaves all surviving ponies.
• Big Brother Is Watching: Earth's government. Also, Celestia, within her own dimension.
• Bittersweet Ending: On the one hand, the Earth is destroyed, the human species is transformed, all the humans who've ever died were lost forever, most traces of human culture or evidence we ever existed are gone, and those who have become ponies are relocated to new lives in Equestria. On the other hand, the Earth was wrecked beyond repair, mankind was in decline, and the ponified humans are now part of the ponies' cycle of reincarnation, shepherded by a being who is pleased by their happiness.
• Black-and-White Morality: In Chatoyance's fics, human society is the black side and the pony society is the white side.
  • There are a couple of instances where she attempts to make ponies a little more grey (most notably A Taste of Grass), but these moments are still very few and far between compared to the constant glorifying of the ponies and demonizing of humans.
• Blind Obedience: The ponies will follow Celestia and Luna without question.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: At least according to one of her Author's Notes on ''The Reasonably Adamant Down with Celestia Newfoal Society", Chatoyance doesn't understand why most readers think her work is misanthropic, despite everything that's on this page.
  • In-universe, Princess Celestia operates by morals that are utterly beyond human comprehension.
• Body Horror:
  • Skimping on the ponification serum causes the person to die horribly as they are locked between human and pony form.
  • The pony body is a nightmare horror to members of the Human Liberation Front.
  • Some PER members see the human body as such.
• Book Burning: While sorting through a shipment of media awaiting judgment by Princess Luna which will determine whether it will be saved or destroyed, the protagonist of Recombinant 63 comes upon a top-secret journal containing the technical details of the ponification serum. Her first thought is that it should be burned on the spot because of the danger should it fall into the hands of those who would misuse it.
• But I Read a Book About It: Gwen, the protagonist of Recombinant 63, never fails to have read somewhere about anything she faces, regardless of how obscure and/or highly classified it is stated to be. The reason given for her knowledge is her participation in a government/Equestrian effort to preserve human knowledge.
• Category Traitor: "Species traitor" is used on at least one occasion.
• Censorship Bureau: Recombinant 63 introduces a program managed by Luna dedicated to selecting – in accordance with guidelines dictated by Celestia – what pieces of human art, music, and writing should be spared, and consigning the rest to destruction. The criterion for censorship includes eliminating information supporting or describing racism, sexism, nationalism, war, murder and crime.
  • Amongst the books rejected by Luna are any which "showed the evils that Man was capable of". It should be noted that this is her own loosened judgment, applied to written works that she feels worthy of secretly preserving in defiance of Celestia's standards, which are implied to be far more strict.
  • Books on ancient warfare are singled out for destruction above all others, for fear that the non-pony species of Equestria might learn from them and find some way to improve their political position, or that native ponies might look down on ponified humans as inferior or dangerous.
  • Officially, by the agreement of both the Earth's government and Celestia, all contemporary accounts of the Earth's final years and of the circumstances and details of its destruction are to be secretly archived beyond the reach of most individuals.
• Cerebus Syndrome: Other than the usual implications and expected plot elements common to most TCB works, Chatoyance's stories were fairly simplistic until The Taste of Grass began developing Celestia's character and fleshing out the setting's details.
• Cessation of Existence: The fate of humans, because they are among the rare species that develop in universes devoid of magical energy.
• Colon Cancer: The PER: The Speed of Right: Michaelson and Morely.
• Corrupt Church: Earth's religions. All of them. In fact, the concept of religion is often regarded as evil.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: All of them.
• Crapsack World: Earth's ecosystem is completely destroyed, the entire planet is governed by a corporate conglomerate, social mobility is rare, and the employment rate is frozen at 2%.
  • New Universe Two: The Most Decadent Thing exchanges the corporate hellhole for a hedonistic transhumanist equivalent of Idiocracy.
• Crystal Dragon Jesus: A mild variant. Chatoyance openly admits that her version of Celestia has substantial similarities to the Old Testament God.
• Cure Your Gays: Inverted; the serum changes the drinker's sexual orientation to pansexual regardless of what it was before.
• Curiosity Causes Conversion: Quite literally. Expressing even the tiniest bit of interest in Equestria draws the PER like flies to honey.
• Cutting the Knot: In Tales of Los Pegasus, a police officer is confronted by a complex mystery involving a shooting, a forced conversion, a PER pegasus, and several conflicting testimonies. He briefly considers solving it, then simply sides with the PER pony and potion-bombs everyone involved.
• Cyberpunk: Several elements of the genre are present in her stories.
• Dancin' in the Ruins: A common theme in the author's works.
• Defeat Means Friendship: Played ramrod straight in Operation HLF Life. The PER attacks and successfully converts an entire fort full of HLF combatants. Upon waking up from the anesthetic effect of the conversion, the former HLF instantly and cheerfully obey the commands of their attackers.
• Democracy Is Bad: Implied. Equestria is an absolute monarchy and it's shown to be a perfect world.
• Despotism Justifies the Means: Celestia's #1 priority is being the final authority in Equestria.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: In New Universe Seven: Mankind Triumphant!, humanity disposes of Discord by running his petrified form through a rock crusher. They then nuke Equestria, decapitate Celestia and stick her head in a sealed box.
• Does Not Like Men: Chatoyance has acquired a reputation as a misandrist because of "The Friendship Virus". However, her other works feature strong and capable male characters.
• Double Standard: This quote from the author states why the ponies are allowed to commit genocide against humanity and be in the right for it but humanity fighting back against the ponies is either evil or just misguided.
  In my stories superior beings - truly superior beings - can do things that if a lesser being, like a human, were to do, it would indeed be evil.
• Dystopia: Earth. Earth is ecologically ruined and humanity survives only because of technology.

E-M

• Eldritch Abomination: Celestia, Luna and Discord.
• The End of the World as We Know It: Two universes collide, the earth is destroyed, and humanity forced to change species to survive the catastrophe.
• Everyone Is Bi: The ponies are apparently naturally pansexual.
• Expy: Blackmesh Security is an expy of Blackwater USA with their negative traits ramped up to eleven.
• Fantastic Racism: Some members of the three types of ponies still think of themselves as better than the other two. This is a reference to the second season episode "Hearth's Warming Eve", where pony racism was presented as existing in the past.
• Filibuster Freefall: Her early stories were mostly normal slice-of-life-type stories with minimal messages and morals and misanthropy. Her later stories often have Heinlein-styled social commentary and exposition — and a heaping dose of misanthropy. Sometimes to the point where they overshadow the rest of the story.
• Five-Token Band: Chatoyance, more than any other TCB author, seems to go out of her way to feature protagonists and side characters that are diverse in race and ethnicity.
• Fix Fic: "Ten Minutes: Aftermath" was written as a response to the anti-pony , pro-human, sentiments of the original story, subverting the message of the original as part of a writing challenge set by TCB author Krass McWriter. The prompt was to "Write a story, or continue a story within another writer's universe." Unfortunately, this resulted in a lot of readers revolting against the story, particularly when it came out that Krass neglected to point out that they should get the permission of the writer of the fic they were basing their own work on. Brony of Steel didn't even know the fic existed until Chat decided to advertise for it in the comments section of his own fic. A move that pissed off readers of the original fic as much as it pissed off readers of her fix fic. Readers have come to see Aftermath as less of a fix fic and more of a massive middle finger to the idea of Celestia being capable of losing, which Chatoyance has effectively admitted to hating, and is part of why she seems to utterly disregard season 2.
• Flat-Earth Atheist: 27 Ounces featured an incredibly insufferable atheist who believed that Celestia and Luna were perpetuating a God Guise, that ponies were Sufficiently Advanced Aliens, that all religious humans were monsters, and that Magic was actually molecular reconstruction beams being powered from a massive generator in Equestria. He even becomes enraged at someone choosing "belief" and seems to totally ignore that in a rational universe, the very existence of Equestria would be impossible. Of course, he has his reasons.
  • Amusingly, most of his vitriol is towards the missionary Elijah (who is notably one of the only religious characters not shown as a Strawman), who nevertheless actually shares his beliefs about Celestia and Luna. It comes to no one's surprise when the two of them end up together after converting.
• Foreshadowing: In Teacup: Down on the Farm, the titular character experiences regret over possessing memories of her difficult life on earth. She is told early on that such memories have value, but pursues having them erased anyway. At the end of the story, she learns the initial suggestion was correct all along.
• A Form You Are Comfortable With: Celestia, Luna, and Discord all have bodies composed of pure magic. It's still enough to make most corporeal onlookers uneasy.
• For Your Own Good: How the ponies feel about the ponification and barrier.
• Fox News Liberal: The Reasonably Adamant Down with Celestia Society stars a group of converted humans who were transformed by force and resent Celestia for it. They are portrayed mostly as incompetent whiners who fail to realize how good they have things, and the author shows them in a more positive light only once they decide they were wrong after all.
• Freudian Threat:
  • Among the many secrets about Celestia uncovered by the central characters of The 800 Year Promise is her ancient use of castration as a tool to breed healthier ponies.
    • Having been reasonably convinced that Wildfire and his wife won't divulge the truth about her many secrets which they have uncovered, Celestia heals the broken ribs he suffered at the hooves of a group of imperfectly ponified HLF operatives. She very pointedly does not, however, restore the testicle which was crushed in the same attack, going so far as to call it "the cost of his adventure" before advising him to avoid getting involved in her affairs again.
• Future Food Is Artificial: All food is synthesized from waste using nanomachines.
• Generic Doomsday Villain: The Human Liberation Front hates ponies and anyone who sympathizes with ponies. And... that's about it.
• Glad I Thought of It: In order to preserve various elements of human culture, the leaders of three incredibly distant cities demand that Celestia leave their population alone in the tenth story of Tales of Los Pegasus. Despite this, Celestia still discreetly checks in on them every hundred years or so in order to acquire any interesting new technology they may have come up with because she values human ingenuity. In other stories, it is revealed that this is one of the many reasons she is willing to permit ponification, and resettlement within her universe.
• Gratuitous Rape: In Tales of Los Pegasus, an angry HLF operative attempts to rape a pony as part of a violent assault. This seems to have been included solely for shock value.
• Grey Goo: In New Universe Four: Phoenix In Hooves, Earth has been entirely devoured by grey goo.
• Heaven: The afterlife for ponies, where they dwell until they are reincarnated, or choose to ascend to a state where they can explore the multiverse. Celestia and Luna, however, are denied the latter option, because they are mysteriously bound to Equestria. Chatoyance has claimed she will one day address the reason the two alicorns are trapped.
• Historical Villain Upgrade: An odd example applying to the entire human race. Humanity's myriad flaws and and atrocities are faithfully recounted, often with historical references; humanity's achievements are also listed and even celebrated as the reason that Celestia is willing to accept humanity being ponified. However, the upside of humanity is dwelt on significantly less often, and is sufficiently downplayed relative to the flaws to make forcible ponification seem like a good idea. To say nothing of the sheer impossibility of listing anything but highlights, which naturally lends itself to skewing the highlights to one view or another (in this case, the negatives).
• Hobbes Was Right: With regards to humans, dragons, diamond dogs, and gryphons.
• Humanoid Abomination: Celestia and Luna merely look like ponies but they are actually beings composed of pure magic.
• Humans Are Special: Humans are one of the few known lifeforms to have evolved in a universe completely devoid of magic. As a result, they're among the rarest of sentient beings - those which lack actual souls.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: Chatoyance loves this. Even going as far as to argue this point in the comments of her stories or even in the comments of other stories.
• Humans Kill Wantonly: Mentioned several times, often with historical references cited.
• Hypocritical Humor: In Going Pony two characters explain the technology behind the process of ponification for the reader, but in the story, stop to wonder aloud why humans always try to explain away magic.
• Insane Troll Logic: When the HLF villains of Recombinant 63 fail in their initial search of the city for the hiding and (unknown to them) ponified protagonist, they joke that their headquarters has been found out because they haven't been murdering enough ponies to meet the statistical average.
• Immigrant Patriotism: Many newfoals are incredibly enthusiastic about doing things the proper Equestrian way, and try hard to assimilate and fit in with the native population.
• Improvised Weapon: In 27 Ounces, Dr. Pastern throws some serum at an HLF operative attacking her, killing her attacker.
  • The PER sometimes uses squirt guns filled with serum in mass ponification attacks.
• Informed Attribute: Despite supposedly being one of the most masterful infiltrators on Earth, the imperfectly converted Ralph Vitoni inevitably arouses the suspicion and distrust of the protagonists of any stories in which he appears within – and sometimes even before – his first spoken sentence.
• In Name Only: Chatoyance's stories share little with the show except for names.
  • She herself actually says as much in this post on her own forum. She makes it clear that she is writing science fiction first, and pony stories second.
  • This is most noticeable in (the admittedly, by Word of God, explicitly experimental reimagining) New Universe Three: The Friendship Virus, which merely mentions the show a couple of times. It manages to arguably be a Conversion Bureau story In Name Only, with the eponymous "bureau" not being an institution that converts people into ponies, but instead, a group of bioterrorists inspired by the show to release a virus that makes men more like women in terms of behavior.
  • There is the fact that The Doctor is depicted as being pro-conversion. That should really speak for itself.
• Insignificant Little Blue Planet: How the ponies, and the general narration, seem to view Earth. Or rather, Insignificant Little Gray Planet.
• Doorstopper: Chatoyance has written over 800,000 words.
  • Chatoyance refers to her works over 50,000 words as novels. This is the official break point for novels as used by the Science Fiction Writers of America.
• Killed Mid-Sentence: In The 800 Year Promise Starshine's journal abruptly ends before he can finish signing his final entry, presumably because he was dragged away by the royal guard to be petrified.
• Knight Templar: Celestia and the ponies fully believe that they are in the right — even though they resort to outright villianous actions.
• Locked Out of the Loop: There is an awful lot Celestia isn't telling humanity. Any human that gets too curious or any pony that gets too talkative gets pulled aside for a chat.
• Longing For Fiction Land: Expressed in this statement attributed to her:
  Sigh. Equestria can't rise from the ocean fast enough.
• Ludd Was Right: Earth is a high-tech cyberpunk Crapsack World. Equestria is a pseudo-medieval steampunk world and a utopia.
• Made of Magic: Celestia, Luna, and Discord all have bodies composed of pure magic.
• Magic Versus Science: Science and technology derived from it are inherently destructive to the environment. Magic can do anything science can achieve and more, all without harming anything.
• Manipulative Bastard: Celestia is good at ensuring that events work in her favor. The only time she's failed to manipulate a situation to reach her own goal involved temporal and spacial shenanigans spanning two alternate realities, one of which she has minimal power within.
• Meaningful Name: The Conversion Bureau worker named Dr. Pastern who eventually ponifes herself. A pastern is part of a horse's body.
• Mechanical Lifeforms: In New Universe One: The Pony Singularity.
• Medieval Stasis: The show's cities and magitech are explained as being the leftover products of the Ponies' flirtation with industry, which was abandoned when the ponies realized that they were destroying their environment.
• MegaCorp: The Corporate Worldgovernment, which owns the entire world, and Blackmesh Security, which serves as their military police.
• Masculine Girl, Feminine Boy: In "The PER: Michelson and Morely", the protagonists consist of the butch Nutmeg Morely and the feminine – and in the end, transgender – Ginger Michelson.
• Mike Nelson, Destroyer of Worlds: Celestia hunts all newfoal alicorns for fear that they'll destroy the universe.
• Misanthrope Supreme: PER members show this tendency.
• The Multiverse: The story focuses on the collision of Equestria and Earth; others are mentioned, though they don't play a major role.

N-Z

• Nanomachines: The basis for the ponification serum. Also heavily used in manufacturing on Earth.
• No Endor Holocaust: The nuke used in "New Universe Seven" is strong enough to destroy one percent of the planet's mass (contained by the Barrier, but still), and the planet is still livable after losing that much matter.
• Omniscient Morality License: This quote by the author more or less cements Celestia as having this, due to the virtue of having a consciousness and awareness billions of times greater than a human mind. Essentially a living goddess, Celestia is described as being able to calculate possible outcomes and futures with inhuman ability.
  In my stories superior beings - truly superior beings - can do things that if a lesser being, like a human, were to do, it would indeed be evil.
• One World Order: Earth is ruled by the Corporate Worldgovernment. Equestria is ruled by Celestia.
• Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions: Humans who go through ponification usually come to view their former beliefs, no matter how religious they were before, as false and primitive. Even some humans before conversion start to see their former beliefs as flawed the moment they find out about Celestia.
• Peace & Love Incorporated: The Conversion Bureaus were set up by the Worldgovernment to rescue as much of humanity as possible before the world was destroyed. Ponification is offered free and without charge to even the most impoverished people.
• Perfect Pacifist People: The ponies are completely incapable of murder or cruelty, though they are capable of self-defense.
• Pointless Doomsday Device: A single one of the Quantum Chromodynamic Weapons referred to as "hypernukes" described in Recombinant 63 supposedly would – in the best-case scenario – destroy nearly one percent of the Earth's mass. Bear in mind that at this point, the Earth is under a One World Government.
• Private Military Contractors: Blackmesh Security.
• Privately Owned Society: Earth.
• Properly Paranoid: The HLF believe that Celestia's benevolent talk is a front and that she is in reality leading a deliberately engineered takeover of the planet. They have absolutely no evidence to back this up and are... biased, to say the least. It turns out they are absolutely right.
• Puny Earthlings: Her interpretation of the ponies has them with special powers (Earth ponies get Super-Strength, pegasi get flight and unicorns get magic), a lifespan of centuries, extremely durable bodies, reincarnation and a "Can't Argue with Elves" attitude.
• Purple Prose: Her writing sometimes lapses into this.
• Reincarnation: Ponies, eventually.
• Ridiculously Cute Critter: Ponies.
• The Right of a Superior Species: According to Word of God, this is why Celestia and Luna cannot be judged by human morality - even if they are committing genocide. This quote says it all:
  "In my stories superior beings - truly superior beings - can do things that if a lesser being, like a human, were to do, it would indeed be evil."
• Religion of Evil: All religions are portrayed as such.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Supernatural Powers!: Celestia, within her own cosmos, is not bound by any rules as she is an Eldritch Abomination. Outside of Equestria, she is increasingly vulnerable and weak, depending on the distance to the Barrier between the two universes.
• Scary Dogmatic Aliens: Her ponies have elements of all four types.
  • Ponies as Nazis: The ponies consider themselves superior to humans, and are in the process of committing a perfect genocide (destroying any sign that a culture ever existed) against humanity.
  • Ponies as Communists: Their plot is to assimilate an entire race to become like them.
  • Ponies as Religious Zealots: Celestia is their goddess, and they will follow her every word.
  • Ponies as Conquistadores: The end result of the Barrier is that all of Earth will belong to Equestria, and be under Equestria's government.
• Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: The hypothetical planet-killing nuclear device in "Ten Minutes: Aftermath" was found to have a mass of 43.6 teragrams (36e+10 kilograms) or about 119 times the mass of the Empire State Building. It's specifically stated to be made of cesium and promethium. The picture drawn of the device shows it to be approximately the same size as the Little Boy bomb dropped on Hiroshima, which weighed a mere 4,400 kg. Even assuming the entire planet buster was filled with promethium at 7.26 grams/cubic cm, that still only comes out to a weight of 8639.4 kg. And for the bomb to weigh that much with the given dimensions, the filling of the bomb would have to have a density of 302,521 kg/cubic cm...which is about the same density as a white dwarf.
• Shared Universe: Chatoyance allows others to freely use her ideas and concepts as stated in this blog post.
• The Soulless: Humans and all other forms of life on Earth.
• Spirit Advisor: Celestia got the attention of the world government by appearing to each of the six hundred or so most powerful individuals in the form of a duplicate of herself that only they could see and hear, and then badgering them day and night, even in their dreams, until they agreed to meet with each other.
• Stable Time Loop: Derpy.
• Start X to Stop X: In the Chatoverse, a human that dies is gone forever because they lack souls. Celestia's ultimate motivation is to save humans from Cessation of Existence by making them not human anymore.
• Straw Character:
  • The vast majority of those who oppose the ponies and don't change their tune are portrayed as this, especially HLF members, the wealthy, and religious people. In 27 Ounces a Straw Atheist also makes an appearance.
• The Stoic: Celestia never shows any emotions stronger than mild irritation or vague amusement.
• Super Breeding Program: The 800 Year Promise mentions that Celestia has undertaken eugenics programs in the past, forcibly sterilizing ponies she deemed to be genetic undesirables in an attempt to strengthen the pony race against the other sentient species inhabiting Equestria.
• Superior Species: The ponies are depicted as being longer-lived, stronger, more moral, kinder and all around better than humans.
• Synthetic Plague: New Universe Three: The Friendship Virus features the "PNY-1" virus created by some bioterrorists that eliminate most differences between sexes.
• Taken for Granite: Petrification is often used by Celestia as a punishment.
• Take That, Critics!: The Reasonably Adamant Down With Celestia Newfoal Society! was widely interpreted as an insult those who criticized the messages in her stories. The story depicts the main characters (who are pretty blatant stand-ins for critics of her setting) as incompetent whiners for daring to be unhappy about their Forced Transformation and they're only portrayed more sympathetically when they realize that they are wrong.
• Tautological Templar: Celestia and the ponies completely fail to see anything wrong with forced conversion and why the human race is so pissed off at them and fighting so hard against them.
• Technology Is Evil: It's hinted that Celestia bans most technological development in Equestria.
• Third Act Stupidity: In The 800 Year Promise. Ralph and his HLF co-conspirators are clever enough to hide amongst the ponies of Equestria for years. They've allegedly got agents at every level of Equestrian society – even in the palace, so there's no running to Celestia for help. All throughout the story they're one step ahead, always having figured out enough to know where they should be looking before the protagonists do. They've fabricated a cover story for anyone who questions them. They know enough about dragon culture and history to attempt to rouse them to anger against Celestia. Four chapters from the end they unsuccessfully sneak into a dragon's cave, beat up his “guests”, and die horribly when he comes home sooner than expected.
  • Villain Has a Point: Before dying, Ralph explains what the final members of the HLF have come to believe about Celestia, the destruction of the Earth, and the true nature of Equestria. Sharptooth, the only character present that is familiar with the princess and knowledgeable enough about the universe to make any assessment of it all thinks he's right.
• This Loser Is You: Humanity is not shown in the greatest of light. While there are humans all across the moral spectrum in her stories, there is the underlying message that ponies are vastly better than humans.
• Trope Codifier: Her works codified many of the many significant plot details of TCB canon, and many other Conversion Bureau stories at least contain elements of her work.
• Unperson: Beings who become a “problem” for Celestia have a tendency to disappear. Later, some lucky civic area is gifted a surprisingly lifelike new statue. It's unclear how or if their disappearance is explained to friends or family, but it's clear that, aside from Discord, nobody hears about them in any history lessons.
• Unsportsmanlike Gloating: In Recombinant 63. After Ralph has a rare and surprising stroke of conscience and decides he's not okay with liquidating an entire city, the Doctor is revealed to have tricked Ralph and gotten him marked for death. He caps this revelation off with a glib insult just for fun.
• Unwilling Roboticisation: The plot of New Universe One: The Pony Singularity.
• Utopia Justifies the Means: Celestia's #2 priority is keeping Equestria a paradise for her ponies.
• Veganopia: Equestria and its ponies.
• Voodoo Shark: Earth and Equestria are established early on as being governed by differing physics models, with Equestria and every other known alternate reality being permeated by a force which destroys any Earthly technology it effects. Early on the reason is given that Equestrian physics breaks terrestrial quantum mechanics, which underlies both biology and the advanced technologies of the world. The details are further elaborated upon in Recombinant 63: A Conversion Bureau Story, in which it is revealed that the Equestrian reality is completely and utterly divorced from that of Earth, to the point that its matter is composed of entirely different fundamental particles. Despite being intended to explain the differences between the two worlds, it actually raises questions as to how the two dimensions are able to interact at all.
• We Are As May Flies: The ponies can live for centuries, as various pieces of show-canon have been interpreted.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: The PER.
• White Man's Burden: Celestia and the ponies pity mankind, whom they view as an inferior species – not really living beings at all, given their lack of magic and therefore souls – and regard it as their duty to save them by transforming them into ponies in both mind and body. However, much like in real life, the darker aspects of cultural destruction are also present.
• Worldbuilding: According to Word of God, this is one of the goals of Chatoyance's many Conversion Bureau stories.
• Writer on Board: Many of her stories are used to espouse her views on such subjects as diverse as human nature, environmentalism, religion, and GLBT issues.
• Year X: Chatoyance's stories are said to take place in 20X0. She has never given a specific time but hints that the time is fifty years in the future.
• You Cannot Grasp the True Form: Celestia sometimes gives mortals a glimpse of her true form when she wishes to terrify them into submission.